Palace of Treason (3 page)

“What are you waiting for? Strip and get on your stomach,” he said, slipping out of his suit coat. He hung it on a nail on the back of the door. “Don’t worry, I have your money. You can send it to your momma in Kiev—that is if she’s not working next door.”

Dominika leaned back and chuckled. “Good evening, Dr. Jamshidi,” she said. “I am not from Ukraine.”

Jamshidi’s head came up at the mention of his name and he scanned her face. Any Iranian nuclear scientist violating sharia and furtively tomcatting in Montmartre quickly sniffs danger. He didn’t ask her how she knew him.

“I don’t care where you’re from,” he said.

So educated,
thought Dominika,
and still so stupid
. “I need a few minutes of your time,” said Dominika. “I assure you it will be of interest to you.”

Jamshidi searched her face. Who was this tart with the Mona Lisa smile? “I told you to get undressed,” he said, stepping toward her, but unsure about what was happening. His ardor was running out of him like the sand in a broken hourglass. He snatched at her wrist and pulled her to her feet. He stuck his face close to hers, drinking in the scent of Vent Vert, searching her eyes behind those incongruous glasses.
“A poil,”
strip, he said. He squeezed her wrist and watched her face. He got nothing. Dominika looked him in the eyes as she put a thumbnail between his first and second knuckle and pressed. Jamshidi jumped with the pain and jerked his hand away.

“Just a few minutes,” Dominika said, with a little lead in her voice, to give him a hint, a taste. She spoke casually, as if she had not just lit up the median nerve of his right hand.

“Who are you?” said Jamshidi sliding away from her. “What do you want?”

Dominika put her hand on his sleeve, pushing the limits, the man-woman Islam thing. Not so big a problem with this educated Persian who lived in Europe, this whoreson with a taste for redheads.

“I want to propose an arrangement,” said Dominika. “A mutually beneficial arrangement.” She left her hand where it was. Jamshidi threw it off and turned for the door. Whatever this was, he wanted out. Dominika stepped smoothly in front of him and Jamshidi put his hand on her chest to push her aside. Slowly, almost tenderly, she trapped his hand tight against her breast with her elegant fingers, feeling his moist palm on her skin. She applied light downward pressure and stepped into him—Jamshidi’s face contorted in pain—forcing him nose-first onto the ratty bedspread. “I insist you let me tell you,” Dominika said, releasing his hand.

Jamshidi sat up on the bed with wide eyes. He knew all he needed to know. “You are from French Intelligence?” he asked, rubbing his wrist.
When Dominika did not react he said, “CIA, the British?” Dominika stayed silent and Jamshidi shuddered at the worst thought, “You are Mossad?”

Dominika shook her head slightly.

“Then who are you?”

“We are your ally and friend. We alone stand with Iran against a global vendetta, sanctions, military threats. We support your work, Doctor, in every way.”

“Moscow?” said Jamshidi, laughing under his breath. “The KGB?”

“No longer KGB, Doctor, now
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki
, the SVR.”

Jamshidi shook his head and breathed easy; no Zionist action team, praise Allah. “And what do you want? What is this nonsense about a proposal?” he said, confidence back now, his yellow stronger.

Zhaba,
you toad,
thought Dominika. “Moscow would like to consult with you; we would like you to advise us on your program.” Dominika braced for the indignation.

“Consult? Advise? You want me to spy on my own country, on my program, to compromise our security?” Jamshidi the righteous, Jamshidi the patriot.

“There is no threat to Iran’s security,” said Dominika evenly. “Keeping Moscow informed will
protect
your country against its enemies.”

Jamshidi snorted. “You are ridiculous,” he said. “Let me up now; get out of my way.” Dominika did not move.

“I mentioned that my proposal would be mutually beneficial, Doctor. Wouldn’t you like to hear how?”

Jamshidi snorted again but stayed still.

“You live and work in Vienna, accredited to the International Atomic Energy Agency. You travel frequently to Tehran. You are the leading expert in your country on centrifugal isotope separation, and for the last several years have directed the assembly of centrifuge cascades at the Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz. Correct so far?”

Jamshidi did not respond but looked at her as he kneaded his hand.

“A brilliant career, steady success in the program, in the favor of the Supreme Leader, and with allies in the Security Council. A wife and children in Tehran. But as a man of exceptional needs, a man who has earned the right to do as he pleases, you have made acquaintances—both in Vienna
and during these occasional furtive and unauthorized weekends in Paris. You appreciate beautiful women, and they appreciate you.”

“May
Shaitan
take you,” said Jamshidi. “You are a liar.”

“How disappointed your friends would be to hear you disavow them,” said Dominika, reaching for her clutch. She took out the phone and held it loosely in her hand. Jamshidi stared at her. “Especially your friend Udranka. She has an apartment in Vienna on Langobardenstrasse, very near your IAEA office. You know it well.”

“You fucking Russians,” said Jamshidi.

“No, actually, you are fucking a Serb. A quite innocent girl, I might add. Udranka is from Belgrade. You’ve seen quite a lot of her.”

“Lies,” stuttered Jamshidi. “No proof.”

Dominika swiped a slim finger across the screen of her phone to start the streaming video and tilted it toward Jamshidi so he could see.

“Your most recent visit, August twenty-third,” narrated Dominika. “You brought candy—Sissi-Kugeln chocolates—and a bottle of Nussberg Sauvignon. She broiled a beefsteak. You sodomized her at twenty-one forty-five hours, and left fifteen minutes later.” Dominika tossed the phone onto the bedspread, watching the brutality of her words work on him as the tinny video continued. “Keep it, if you wish.” He looked once again at the screen and slid it away from him.

“No,” he said. The color around his head and shoulders was bleached out, barely visible. Dominika knew he had already calculated the unspoken threat. The mullahs would execute him if his twisted little habits were exposed, if his prurient misuse of official funds was revealed, but especially if his
stupidity
at being blackmailed was brought to light. “No,” he repeated.

Ran’she syadyesh, ran’she vydyesh, thought Dominika,
the sooner you get in, the sooner you get out.
She sat beside him and started talking softly, concealing her contempt. He was a beetle in a matchbox, with nowhere to move—Dominika didn’t let him protest or feign ignorance. Instead she firmly told him the rules: He would answer her questions, they would meet discreetly, she would give him “expense money,” she would protect him, and (with a subtle nod) he could continue taking his pleasure with Udranka. They would meet in Vienna, at Udranka’s apartment, in seven days’ time. He should reserve the entire evening. Dominika asked whether
that was convenient, but got up before he could answer. He had no choice. She walked to the door, opened it a crack, and turned to look at him sitting small and quiet on the stained bedspread.

“I will take care of you, Doctor,” she said, “in all things. Are you coming?”

They left the room and descended the narrow staircase with peeling paper and creaking treads. The
ubiytsa
came from around the counter and stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Fifty euros,” he said, arms across his chest. “Entertainment tax.” A brown haze floated around his head: cruelty, violence, stupidity. Uncomprehending, Jamshidi tried to squeeze by him, but the man pinned him to the wall with a meaty forearm under the chin. His other hand brought up a cutthroat razor. “One hundred euros,” said the man, looking up at Dominika. “Prostitution tax.” Pinned by the neck, Jamshidi could only goggle as she stepped off the last stair and drew close.

Dominika was partially conscious of a faint annoyance at being interrupted, nettled at an outside interference. Her vision was acute and ice clear in the center, but hazy around the margins. She smelled the thug through his shirt, smelled the brown animal essence of him. Without a break in stride, Dominika pushed right up to him, through his brown cloud, and grasped the back of his greasy head softly, lovingly. Her other hand clamped onto the side of his face, her thumb at the hinge of his jaw. She pressed violently in and up—she felt the temporomandibular joint click under her thumb pad—and the brute’s head came up and he howled in pain, the razor falling from his fingers. In a cloud of funk and perfume, Dominika pulled his smelly hair and yanked his head back. An instant flashing thought:
What would
Bratok
, big brother Gable, one of her CIA handlers, think about this temper of hers?
Then, electrically, a second thought:
What would all her Americans feel as they watched her in this reeking stairwell doing
this— Her focus snapped back and she struck the bruiser once with the open web of her hand, very fast, in the windpipe. The man grunted once as Dominika pulled him violently backward, hitting his head against the wall to the sound of crunching plaster. He lay on the floor and didn’t move.

Dominika bent, picked up the straight razor, and folded it closed, stilling an impulse to reach over and drag the edge heavily across the unconscious thug’s throat. Jamshidi had slid slowly to the floor, gasping. She squatted beside him, her dress riding halfway up her thighs and revealing
the lacy black triangle of her underwear, but Jamshidi was staring only at her luminous face, a strand of hair bedroom-sexy over one eye. Slightly out of breath, she spoke softly, straightening her eyeglasses. “I told you we support our friends. I will protect you always. You’re my agent now.”

Three a.m. and the fourth arrondissement was dark and quiet. The Louboutins were pinching as Dominika walked through the narrow streets of the Marais back to her boutique hotel near Place Sainte-Catherine.
Tant pis,
a shame, but one does not go barefoot on the sidewalks of dog-loving Paris.

Finishing her encrypted text to Zyuganov as she walked, Dominika did a quick appraisal of the pitch. Stepping over the unconscious thug, a bewildered Jamshidi had stutter-stepped into the night, nodding vaguely at Dominika’s sweet whispered reminder to meet in a week’s time. The yellow fog around his head was starched almost white with shock. She reported the results of the Jamshidi pitch modestly to the Center—and to a skeptical and resentful Zyuganov—as a provisional success. As in all intelligence operations, she would not know whether Jamshidi was fully cooked until and unless he appeared at Udranka’s apartment in Vienna in a week, docile and ready to be debriefed. The continued lollipop promise of the 1.85-meter-tall, magenta-haired Serb, now a Sparrow under Dominika’s direction, would be an incentive for Jamshidi to behave. Dominika commiserated with her Sparrow, shared an occasional glass of wine with her, paid her well—solidarity between sisters. Most of all, she had listened to Udranka’s canny assessments of Jamshidi, every detail, the better to stopper him in the recruitment bottle.

As she walked along the deserted street she checked her six for trailing surveillance, unlikely at this hour, by crossing the street and taking half-second snap glances in either direction. She was escorted first by one, then two, then three, street cats, tails high and trotting serpentinely around her ankles. Dominika thought that Sparrow School had wrought one elemental change. Her life had been forever altered when she was directed against an officer of the American CIA—specifically Nathaniel Nash—to unman him, to compromise him, to elicit the name of his Russian mole. But the whole operation had turned out differently than her SVR masters planned, hadn’t it? She was now working with CIA, spying for the Americans, she told herself, because Russia was rotten, the system was a canker. And yet, what
she was doing, she was doing
for Russia
. She had thrown in with CIA,
she
had become the mole. And she had fallen into Nate’s bed against all logic, against all prudence. She closed her eyes for a second and whispered to him, “Where are you, what are you doing?” One of the French cats looked over its shoulder at her, and gave her a
qu’est-ce que j’en sais
? look. How should I know?

That same minute, in the deserted offices of Line KR, Zyuganov fumed in his darkened office, the light of a single desk lamp highlighting Egorova’s text-message report of the successful Paris recruitment approach to Jamshidi at the Pigalle nightclub, forwarded a few minutes earlier via encrypted email. The terse report detailing the episode stared up at him, mocking him. Egorova was a direct threat to him, her facile management of the operation making him look plodding and trivial. Zyuganov scanned the short paragraph, weighing risk and gain.
She’s done well, flying solo, this well-titted-out upstart,
he thought. The Paris
rezidentura
had been totally cut out of the operation—no need for additional, local colleagues shouldering up to the trough. He reread her message—clipped, balanced, modest. Zyuganov squirmed in his seat, his envy overlaid by annoyance that built into a gnashing anger, fueled by fearful self-interest.

Her Jamshidi approach up to this point had been a precise operation, and she managed it with relentless thoroughness in a short time.
Damn it,
thought Zyuganov. Egorova had researched the target, conducted surveillance in Austria and France to determine his patterns, and then meticulously concocted a classic
polovaya zapadnya,
honey trap, using a primal, leggy Slav as a nectar bribe to lure the goateed physicist into the snap trap of a chintz-upholstered Viennese love nest that kept his
khuy
in a perpetual state of leaky anticipation.
Invaginirovatsya.
Jamshidi had been turned
inside out
. And tonight she had stage-managed the Paris pitch—playing the hooker, naturally. Zyuganov calculated: Egorova was returning to Moscow from Paris tomorrow. His crawly mind raced as he searched through papers on his desk to find the name of her hotel—Paris can be a dangerous city. A very dangerous city. Zyuganov picked up the phone.

The cats had deserted her. Three thirty in the morning and a bird was trilling in a tree along Rue de Turenne as Dominika turned into the dimly lit Rue de Jarente. There was a single lamp burning over the door of the Jeanne d’Arc; she’d have to buzz the night porter to get in. She was nearly to the entrance when she heard footsteps coming from across the narrow street, from behind the parked cars on the right curb. Dominika turned toward the sound while leaning on the night-bell button with her shoulder blade.

A man was approaching—a large man with black, shoulder-length Fabio hair and a leather coat. From her left, a second man rounded the corner of a side street and walked toward her. He was shorter but thicker, balding, and wore a padded vest over a work shirt. She saw a wiggly leather sap in his right hand. They both looked at Dominika with dull, wet-lipped relish.
Not professionals,
she thought,
not from any intel service. These were gonzo bullyboys high on absinthe and blunts.
Dominika leaned on the bell again, but there was no response from inside the hotel, no lights, nothing stirring, and she backed smoothly away from the entrance, hugging the wall, her red-soled Louboutins rasping on the pavement. She kept facing the two men, who had now converged and were walking shoulder to shoulder. She backed into another side street, Rue Caron, which opened onto tiny Place Sainte-Catherine—cobblestoned, tree-lined, stacked café tables darkly sleeping.
Two fights in one night: You’re pushing your luck,
she thought.

With the extra room, the men rushed her, hands out to grab her arms, and as the sap came up Dominika touched off the lipstick gun in her bag, the metallic
click
of the electric primer muffled by the disintegrating satin clutch. Close range, point and shoot. There was a puff of goose down as the bullet hit the vest just above the shorter man’s right nipple and its metal dust core expanded inside his chest cavity at three times the rate of a copper slug, vaporizing the vena cava, right ventricle, right lung, and the upper lobe of his liver. He collapsed as if spined, and his chin made a
tok
as it hit the
pavès
of the square. The black sap on the cobbles looked like a dog turd.

A
two-shot
lipstick gun,
she thought. Fabio was on her now, a head
taller. A streetlamp lit up his red-rimmed eyes, and the air around his head was swimming yellow. As he reached to grab her, a not unpleasant scent of leather came off him. She gave him a wrist, which he took, and she trapped his hand and quickly stepped into him, leaning him back on his heels. Dominika hooked her calf slightly behind his leg and pushed with her shoulder, applying torque to his knee. He should have gone down and given her time to put the heel of her shoe into his eye socket, but he grabbed the plunging front of her dress and pulled her down with him, tearing the material and exposing the lacy cups of her bra. They hit hard together, and Fabio rolled Dominika over onto her back, the Louboutins flying off, and he was on top of her—she smelled his leather jacket and the stale-cake bloom of week-old shirt—and she was using her hands to try to reach something, eyes, temples, soft tissues, but there was a singing bang and her head rocked, and maybe she could take one, two of those punches, but not many more.

The weight was off and Fabio was standing over her; she covered up but he kicked her ribs once and was measuring the distance for a big-booted neck stomp when a blessed street cleaner holding a power nozzle connected to a little bug-nosed water truck with a merry revolving orange light entered the other end of the square and started hosing down the cobbles. Fabio kicked Dominika again in the ribs, a glancing blow, and ran. She lay on the ground for a second, feeling her ribs for damage, watching the sweeper truck wetting down the far end of the square. She turned her head and saw the body of the man she had shot, lying small and facedown in a pool of black blood.
The sweepers would have some extra spraying to do,
she thought.
Now get out of here
. Stifling a groan, Dominika rolled to her feet, gingerly retrieved her shoes and glasses, and limped around the corner to her hotel, holding the scraps of her dress together with her other hand. She was quite a sight: She’d tell the night porter she was through working conventions—the hell with fertilizer salesmen from Nantes.

She left the room lights off and went into the bathroom, peeled off her torn dress, and examined the bruises in the mirror—red now, the eggplant purple would come tomorrow. Her cheek ached. She put a cold cloth on her eye, then eased herself with a groan into a hot tub, thinking about the towering coincidence of being mugged in Paris, about the pitch to Jamshidi.

And about Zyuganov.
Yadovityi,
poisonous. One of only two men she had ever known who showed not color but black foils of evil. She guessed that he betrayed without conscience, and would in turn expect and watch for betrayal. She knew he would consider Putin’s heavy-lidded attention to her a serious threat, as if she were stalking him with a knife. And an operational triumph—such as recruiting Jamshidi—would be equally threatening to his standing. So if she failed, or if she was injured—say
, mugged on the street
—Zyuganov could take over management of the operation and personally carry the sensational intelligence reports to the fourth floor of Yasenevo and to the Kremlin.

It was the familiar, acid taste of double cross, the usual knife-across-the-throat treachery, and Dominika weighed her grim determination to fight them, to burn down the Service, to damage their lives. She considered reactivating contact with the CIA and Nate now, this very evening. Her assignment to Line KR and the Jamshidi case would potentially provide magnificent access, stupendous intelligence. They would marvel at her accomplishment in so short a time. She sank up to her neck in the hot water. She had six hours before her flight to Moscow.

It wasn’t her mother this time. Marte had been a classmate at Sparrow School—corn-silk blond hair, blue eyes, and delicate lips—who, driven mad by the salacious requirements of the school, had hanged herself in her dormitory room. Dominika had been very sorry at the time, then furious: Another soul consumed by the Kremlin furnace. Marte sat on the rim of the tub and trailed her fingertips in the bathwater. There’s time enough later for the Americans, said Marte; you have to go back now and put the noose around the neck of the Devil.

Dominika returned to Moscow on the morning Aeroflot flight from Paris sore and stiff, one raccoon eye throbbing. A car brought her to Yasenevo directly, and before she could report to Zyuganov, a waiting aide whisked her into the elevator and up to the executive fourth floor, past the portrait gallery of former directors, bushy-browed and wearing their medals on the lapels of their Savile Row suits, their rheumy eyes following the familiar figure of Dominika Egorova along the cream-carpeted hallway.
Hello! You
again. Have they caught you yet?
the directors asked her as she passed.
Take care,
malyutka,
be careful little one.

Pushing through the door of the director’s suite, then passing through the lush-carpeted reception area and into the office brought back a flood of memories, of when she had been manipulated by her uncle Vanya Egorov, then first deputy director of SVR. Dominika and her dear uncle had quite a history together: Vanya had used her as sexual bait in a political assassination, then recruited her into the Service, then packed her off to Sparrow School—Whore School—for professional instruction in the carnal arts. She knew his yellow halo of deceit and puffery all too well, and didn’t blink an eye when he was removed from the fourth floor, dismissed from the Service, pension forfeited.